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In this 300-word paper, I will prove that the world exists, beyond a reasonable doubt, as I was assigned. 277 words to go. First premise: as everybody I know will tell you, I am to blame for everything. My survey techniques are not scientific, but the results are unanimous; beyond a doubt, then, I am to blame. Second premise: if the world doesn’t exist, it can’t affect anything and nothing can afflict it, so evidence that someone had beset the world or that the world had excruciated someone would be evidence of the world. Third premise: every lousy thing I’ve done has beleaguered the world, proving the world exists, or has beleaguered nothing, proving nothing. Oh, and every noble thing, too. Things I had good intentions to do and never got around to belong to the null set, if I understand the null set. Ergo, ergo nothing. 152 hollow words to go. My proofs are as phony as my denials. I say I wasn’t there but I was there if the world exists. I say I wasn’t impaired but I never explain how that could be. I say someone else called Dad to come get me, the cops might have called him, but I know who called. They’d smudged my fingers and mug-shotted me. They’d taken away my car. Dad tossed me the keys to his when we left the station. I knew that meant he’d been heavily drinking. I never got around to telling him what I’d been heavily doing. Ergo. For the second time that night, I took the wheel of something that could clobber the world, then drove us both at breathtaking speed and with evident purpose directly to the scene of a horrible accident only I survived. How about that? I did it in 299.

Copyright © October 05, 2007